Tag: (E) dig

(2018) Ten lectures on NSM

Goddard, Cliff (2018). Ten lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Exploring language, thought and culture using simple, translatable words. Leiden: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789004357723

These lively lectures introduce the theory, practice, and application of a versatile, rigorous, and non-Anglocentic approach to cross-linguistic semantics.

Table of contents:

  1. Preliminary material
  2. From Leibniz to Wierzbicka: The history and philosophy of NSM
  3. Semantic primes and their grammar
  4. Explicating emotion concepts across languages and cultures
  5. Wonderful, terrific, fabulous: English evaluational adjectives
  6. Semantic molecules and semantic complexity
  7. Words as carriers of cultural meaning
  8. English verb semantics: Verbs of doing and saying
  9. English verb alternations and constructions
  10. Applications of NSM: Minimal English, cultural scripts and language teaching
  11. Retrospect: NSM compared with other approaches to semantic analysis

Chapter 3 discusses selected exponents of primes in Farsi (Persian). Chapter 4 provides an explication of a North-Spanish homesickness word (morriña). Chapter 7 provides an explication of Chinese 孝 xiào ‘filial piety’.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

(2015) English – Physical activity verbs

Goddard, Cliff (2015). Verb classes and valency alternations (NSM approach), with special reference to English physical activity verbs. In Andrej Malchukov & Bernard Comrie (Eds.), Valency classes in the world’s languages, vol. 2 (pp. 1671-1701). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. DOI: 10.1515/9783110429343-020

This study examines five English physical activity verbs (eat, pour, dig, carry, cut) and, using a dedicated semantic template, proposes detailed semantic explications for the basic activity-in-progress meanings of these verbs. It then shows, with a different template, how these basic meanings can be transposed into perfective uses. The study examines and explicates 11 alternations (specialized constructions) involving the five verbs, showing in each case exactly how the alternations are related to the base semantics of the verb. In his demonstration, the author relies on the concept of derivational base, which is a new concept in NSM studies.

The general picture is that the specialized constructions are quasi-derivational in nature: the primary or semantically basic sense of the verb is embedded in a more elaborate configuration containing additional semantic material. Often much of this additional material is modeled on the semantics of verbs that belong to different semantic types (lexicosyntactic blending), but it can be partly idiosyncratic or non-predictable. Each specialized construction represents a kind of “word in construction” polysemy.

Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tagged as: , , , ,

(2016) English – Verbs of ‘doing and happening’

Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). Explicating the English lexicon of ‘doing and happening’. Functions of Language, 23(2), 214-256. DOI: 10.1075/fol.23.2.03god

This study proposes NSM semantic explications for a cross-section of the English verbal lexicon of ‘doing and happening’. The twenty-five verbs are drawn from about a dozen verb classes, including verbs for non-typical locomotion (crawl, swim, fly), other intransitive activities (play, sing), manipulation (hold), activities that affect material integrity (cut, grind, dig), creation/production (make, build, carve), actions that affect people or things (hit, kick, kill) or cause a change of location (pick up, put, throw, push), bodily reactions to feelings (laugh, cry), displacement (fall, sink) and weather phenomena (rain, snow).

Though the verbs explicated are specifically English verbs, they have been chosen with an eye to their relevance to lexical typology and cross-linguistic semantics (many are drawn from the Verb Meanings List of the Leipzig Valency Patterns project) and it is hoped that the analytical strategy and methodology exemplified in this study can be a useful model for research into other languages. The study demonstrates the application of the NSM concept of semantic templates, which provide a clear “skeletal” structure for explications of considerable internal complexity and which help account for shared semantic and grammatical properties of verbs of a given subclass.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,